Sehr interessantes Buch, mit großartiger, komplexer Sprache. Eine Welt voller faszinierender Syntax und großer Worte. Das Ende war interessant, auf allem weil es zu einem gewissen Grad auch realistisch ist. Kein Happy End ist ein faszinierendes Konzept und ja... Gutes Buch. ( )

Spoilers for those who don't know their classic literature

Stephen Fry updates The Count of Monte Cristo for the Millennium. That's not just embarrassing press release speak, the dotcom bubble plays a huge part in the latter part of the novel – and having been born in the 1980s, the adolescent nostalgia rush the book gave me earns it a star all on its own.

On the other hand, I find stories of betrayal and false imprisonment very difficult. I suppose you could dig into my childhood for reasons behind that too, but let's be honest, the enduring success of the story of Edmond Dantès suggests plenty of people don't like being screwed over or accused of things they haven't done.

And boy are people screwed over in The Stars' Tennis Balls. It's not a book for the squeamish – bits are up there with Misery for the levels of cruelty they depict. But cruel it must be or Ned/Dantes's revenge would not be so satisfying.

It never escaping the boundaries of the original text, but it's not clear it wants to, and it doesn't need to in order to be a taut and compelling thriller.

(Some might complain that the plot relies on most people in power knowing each other by some extension, but after almost a decade of living in London, I'm willing to buy that.) ( )

Fry's modern-day version of The Count of Monte Cristo, with a young Oxford student in the part of Edmund Dantes (now Ned Maddstone).

I read The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time last year. Going into it (I have to be honest here), I thought I was likely in for a bit of a slog, but boy, was I wrong. I LOVED it, and as long as it is, I was still sad when it was over. I'm also a long-time and devoted fan of Stephen Fry's work, and I picked this one up without knowing anything about it, not needing to know because I knew it would be amazing. And it is. So. Amazing. Fry does a fantastic and clever job of translating the story and the characters into a modern setting. I loved it. LOVED it. ( )

It took me quite a while to get into the story, but having gotten past the first part which reads like an excerpt from Moab, I could not put it down. I had - on purpose - not read any reviews for this book, and am now glad about that as most reviews only make the comparison to The Count of Monte Christo.

What about the resonances of other works, though? I couldn't help but also be reminded of Zweig's Chess Story, Duerrenmatt's Physicists, The Bourne Identity, and Pulp Fiction. All in all I was reminded of a venerable hodge podge of dilemmas. The kind of pastiche episodes that make fab reading in any graphic novel, except of course that The Stars' Tennis Balls isn't a graphic novel.
Isn't it?
It will probably take a few days before I can make up my mind about this one.

In any case, 5 stars for gripping my imagination, for making me reconsider literary genres, for keeping me up half the night pondering about the characters, for - no doubt - sticking in my head for a long time to come. ( )

This is basically an updated version of The Count of Monte Cristo, a book which I love.
It's funny, I am perfectly happy to cheer on Dantes's revenge in that book, but when it's translated to modern times it just seems horrifically extreme and you can't sympathize with it at all.
Maybe that was the point? ( )